Have you ever wondered how to find a microfossil? You can’t see them in hand sample (mostly), and certainly not at outcrop. So when you are in the field, how do you choose what rocks to take home, and which to leave behind?

In my most recent endeavour of my PhD I aim to answer exactly this question. By building an image database of fossiliferous and non-fossiliferous mudstones build from my own, and museum based collections, I will be using image-based supervised machine learning algorithms to understand, and eventually predict, whether new mudstones may contain microfossils, purely based on the optical features presented in hand sample.

Stay tuned for more!